On Second Thought

The excitement is hitting me this morning, as it periodically does. A 4:30 a.m. bathroom stumble turned into an hour of restlessness, thinking of all that is changing in our lives and all of you that are steady in our thoughts. The insects are buzzing, the birds sing (as do the fishing boats and motorbikes), and the sun is preparing to turn a warm and humid night into a blazing sweatbox day in Macau. I’m sitting by the pool in our hotel on the isle of Coloane in this former Portuguese colony that is now one of the Special Administrative Regions of China. CHINA. There isn’t a lot of lounging time, so by the time I finish writing this newsletter, I expect that we will be in Dalian, a small village of about four million in northeastern China. (CHINA!)

I’ll try to be brief. (I will fail. Skim as you wish.) After a challenging fall/winter semester at Merivale High in Ottawa – teaching mainly outside my area, taking on too much (including a Senior basketball team and assorted other attempts to immerse myself in the school community), enduring the usual frustrations of a rabid idealist in a 21^st-century Canadian school (one I liked quite well) – I found that there wasn’t a spot for me there in the spring. This is mainly the nature of the beast, as my return to teaching in Ottawa consists of temporary contracts only. I thought I’d found a school to call home, but I was foolishly optimistic. I quickly found another contract, though, teaching French at Canterbury High, the very fine Arts school where son David had specialized in Literary Arts (his acceptance into which had been key to our 2002 move to Ottawa). It was fun to walk the halls and work with many of the teachers that had been Dave’s.

But my return to teaching was not going as I’d hoped. For one thing, time and energy and focus to write were hard to come by, but I was also in my fourth school with little prospect of teaching English much. Mercifully, I found a bright lining to my blanket of frustration: I wasn’t tied down. I was free, indeed life seemed to be encouraging me, to think outside the Ottawa School Board box. Most important, Diana wasn’t far away: she, too, had had a grinding year at Environment Canada, and was more than ready to conspire with me about changing things. (She is Moving Woman, after all.) We’d long talked about someday going abroad, and last February we got serious. Africa, where Diana was born, where our family’s English and French and other capabilities might be useful, where the needs are so painfully obvious, has always called us.

In the Baha’i world, though, there is great excitement and attention toward China. (China is really BIG. Have you heard?) Not only did it give us one of the best opportunities to increase our cred as “global citizens” – something I’ve long tried to be, though I’ve only ever lived in everlasting Canuckitude – but there is also a young, relatively small but vibrant community here that can soak up every ounce of experience and enthusiasm (and English) that we can bring to it. And a whole lot more. And once we started to give some serious consideration to it, our wonder grew and the doors opened quite readily. Wonder? Something like 1 in 4 human beings speak pu tong hua, a.k.a. Mandarin, the national language (though there are many more local languages and dialects), and in the space of the year we’ve committed to this place, Diana and I will be clumsily able, we think, and Sam will have gained considerable fluency in a third language. It’s a 5000-year-old culture that has much more to offer the world than cheap sneakers and dollar-store doodads.

Openness? Although we’ve all had our anxieties, we had easily found work for me (teaching English conversation and culture to post-graduate students at the Dalian University of Technology – DUT to the ex-pats, Ligong to the cab-drivers), introductory Chinese lessons and newly arrived friends from Dalian while we were still in Ottawa, renters for our house (one of whom is a student from China) and a buyer for our car, an open-ended leave for Diana from Environment Canada, a school for Sam that a British Baha’i couple here had found for their kids (their Jack is Sam’s new buddy here; what a welcome he and his father Joe provided us with, and did I mention that my job at DUT is the one his mother Jane had last year?) and, most of all, while we’ve had language problems at every turn (often quite hilarious ones, as when we were in a nice restaurant ordering jiao zi – dumplings – with moos and other farmyard noises to indicate what filling we wanted!), we have been beautifully welcomed and already feel that we have a dozen people here that we can call friends. (Sheesh, what a sentence! Everybody with me?) In part, of course, it’s a Baha’i thing: everywhere we go in the world, there are friends who share our heartiest visions and hopes and habits. So we have already been able to call upon five different Chinese friends to buy cellphones, bedding (hand-sewn sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers while Diana and “Coco” waited), kitchenware, food and the apartment I’m sitting in now while Sam and Diana are playing Frisbee golf in a small forest over at Ligong. In part, it’s a Chinese thing. While those that don’t have much/any English (the majority) are often amused and mystified by our attempts at conversation, we have found great friendliness and desire to help.

One day, downtown, Diana received yet another call from a Chinese bank employee about the CIBC card she’d left in a bank machine. It appeared the card had been found, but she couldn’t understand what was being said and, in her inimitable way, got a young man on a street corner to take the cellphone. He spoke no English, and didn’t at all understand our attempts at Chinese, but after listening to the woman on the phone, and pointing and talking with the woman he was with (his mother?), he motioned us to follow him. ‘Ah,’ we thought, ‘what luck! The bank is just over there.’ Then he got on a bus, and urged us to follow. And then we rode for 15 minutes. And then we followed him on foot for another five. And finally, in a box-strewn fourth floor of the bank building, our down-home Canadian card was produced from a shoebox. And this young man, refusing money for his time and trouble, was insisting on taking us back to where we had been until we finally convinced him that we’d take a taxi. He was a pretty shy kid, actually, but he might as well have been head of the Dalian chamber of commerce.

Soon, I’ll start teaching. We’ll see how that goes, but I suspect it might be a fairly cushy gig. I’ll be doing conversational English and something called “Anglo-American culture”, which a) will end up being fairly (or unfairly) Canadian and/or b) might cause an international incident if, as I suspect, our mutual definitions of “culture” collide. [September 9 note: Found out today that it’s all conversational English, some Master’s degree and some Doctoral students. I make up the course, so there will be basketballs and great speeches.] But these are bright and highly motivated students, although I’m sure the English portion is not likely the part of their program that’ll keep them up nights. I’m having my usual late-August, early-September teacher anxiety dreams, but I don’t think this will be too much of a strain. That’s good, ‘cause it will leave more training- and straining-time for learning Chinese, supporting Sam, doing what we can to serve the Baha’i community, and maybe even a little writing. Diana has already had several feelers about teaching English, but she’s not eager to work. There’s enough challenge just buying groceries; she tried to buy an iron today without accompaniment from a Chinese speaker, and ran from the Trust Mart with two competing store clerks (possibly) chasing her and (undoubtedly) swearing. (Slight exaggeration.)

It has now (a September 8^th evening, beautiful sunset over the Dalian mountains, a chill in the air that without fail gets me thinking football season despite aging bones and exotic geography) been nearly a month since we left Ottawa. We flew first to the Washington D.C. conference of the Association for Baha’i Studies, one of my favourite events ever. I ran the Mall, did a couple of loops around the Washington Monument, sobbed a little in the Lincoln Memorial (serious, magnificent, from the front steps of which Dr. King proclaimed his Dream), and wandered the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum with Diana and Sam. The conference, in addition to being a second farewell from many fine old friends, was and is an exciting series of ideas shooting like comets across the night sky of my mind. It’s reason and faith flying in tandem, exploring widely. Most often, even if a session doesn’t grab me right away, there’s one down the hall that does. Sweet. And next year it’s in Vancouver, so we’re hoping to be there. (The Jay of We, anyway.)

And after a night with a dear American couple (and thanks again, Peter, for all the luggage hauling and that dawn ride to the airport), we were on a plane to Chicago, then to Hong Kong, about 16 hours in the air and an arrival in late afternoon that our bodies insisted was early the next day. We stored four of our six suitcases, and dragged the other two and ourselves to Macau, another Special Autonomous Region of China, a former Portuguese colony that is the casino capital of southeast Asia. Money, money, money. We saw some of the touristy bits, but we were there for six days of sweating study, a workshop of Baha’is trying to understand and use the principles and the practices that lead to the building of civilized communities, as small as one’s family or buddies and as big as the world. We sang, we consulted, we prayed, and we sweated. (People pay big money for saunas, and we had hours of it each day fer nuttin’!) We made some fast new friends, many of whom were also going (or returning) to China, and though Sam was the only kid there, the youth in particular were wonderful to him, and organizers found some of Macau’s Baha’i kids to swim, play Monopoly or cards or electrogadgets with. And before we knew it, we were back in Hong Kong airport for our August 25^th flight to Dalian.

I was hoping to be able to give all of you a Wordpress or Blogger page, where we’d post less-wordy things than often appear on JamesHowden.com (and pictures!), but so far I’ve had no luck. I think they’re blocked in China right now. So we’re posting news and photos on a  Google site called “Dalian Notebook”. Anyway, here’s the rest of the news.

The GANG. Oldest son Ben and his trusty (rusty) trombone returned to McGill’s Jazz Performance program last September after a couple of eventful years away. Though he had a good semester and was playing well, earlier discomforts were still there, so he tried a more purely academic bent in the spring. It made all the difference. A recent email from him had him back in the arts mill and loving it again, after a straight-A spring semester in which one of his profs was even encouraging him to try to get an undergraduate paper published in an academic journal. He’s home, I think, after some student wandering: he’s a reader, a writer with an unpublished novel, and a deep thinker, and right now he’s thinking of Psychology as his major. He also pursues the martial art ninjitsu, along with other forms of personal development, in a serious way. He falls in love, with ideas and young women, fairly frequently.

Brother Will, now 25, spent much of the last year in Ottawa working in outdoor advertising and doing some university coursework on the side. (He also had a short sentence in our basement while he got settled.) Because of his long days and long drives, we were never able to enact our idea of coaching high school basketball together last year; perhaps a good thing with this frustrating crew, as he might’ve been inclined to punch at least one of ‘em! But Ottawa turned out to be only the beginning of his travels. He has now been in Canada’s Arctic for months, first spending a few weeks in Arviat where his brothers and mother Grace had lived, before moving up to Pond Inlet. It’s on the northern end of Baffin Island; check it out! Grace is a superintendent of education there, and she and Will have been having something of an “old-home week” which shows no signs of ending. He’s worked as a jail guard – “easiest job in the world” – making surprising money and having time for shocking amounts of reading, and by now has started doing some supply teaching. He’s also planning to coach basketball up there; it is heart-warming to this old whistle-blower (gymnasium version) that Will is so keen to help out kids in this particular way.

David has departed academic study for a time after completing three semesters. I’m hoping he’ll resume at McGill after Christmas (at which point he’ll have qualified for Quebec-resident status, meaning substantially lower tuition), but he has hugely enjoyed study and subsequent work he’s done in backstage theatre work (lighting, set-building) and is considering training at the National Theatre School, which is also in Montreal. Like Ben, he loves the city (and like David before him, Ben did a five-week immersion program in French, even staying with the same billeting family), and he loves the small community he and his house-mates have built. His quest for truth and his passion for justice continue to be expressed in various forms of activism – our travels interrupted an interesting and challenging discussion he was having with his dad about the evils of the Olympics and its excesses -- and in his usual hungry learning. After a few years away, he’s re-igniting the reading of fiction and his own writing. Like his two brothers, the story of what careers and other adventures David will pursue remains to be written. The suspense is riveting!

If Sam (9) continues to enjoy sport, especially basketball, Dalian is an interesting place to be. It has a beautiful new football stadium (soccer to you North Americans) and the game is supposed to be big in this town, but basketball courts are EVERYWHERE. I’d understood that China is mad for basketball, and the courts at DUT and other local schools are many and they are busy. I played about an hour of old-guy-trying-to-hang-in-with-kids this morning. The three young men – all from Macau, interestingly enough – were good enough to enjoy the game with, and not so good that I didn’t fit in. No major injuries (other than slight pride contusions) were reported. But here’s the thing for Sam: there don’t appear to be leagues and clubs and school sport as we know it, so he’ll have to grow willing to go to the public courts and fields if he wants to play. Mainly, he wants to play Monopoly, continue his frenzied reading (Harry Potter forever, and much else), listen to Swing, his favourite Franco-Ontarian rock band, and just lately he’s drawing up a storm. Nice. (Except for Swing and Monopoly, he spends most of his time in class these days doing these things. And sleeping, sometimes. He seemed very impressed that he was allowed to just keep sleeping/reading/drawing. His teacher knows very well that not much makes sense to him yet.) 

September 13: School continues to be difficult for Sam, but he’s adjusting better. “I love Dalian!” he said yesterday, as we were walking home from playing ball at the university. He’d forgotten how much he likes basketball, too, especially when he got some roars of approval, from a large group of freshmen students out doing their military training, for baskets he made. His Mum was a little surprised to hear of his enthusiasm (already?) for the city; she has loved the people and found the place fascinating, if confusing at times, but not yet on her Most Wanted list. Diana will miss, in no particular order, baking cookies (seems daunting when most homes don’t have ovens and butter is a luxury), cross-country skiing (though apparently there is some downhill and snowboarding here with artificial snow), and biking. Her view of traffic here makes it utterly unlikely that she’ll swing a leg over a bicycle; it’s a little wild, and if you have the view of China as bicycle heaven, it ain’t. Only the very poor are biking, and it’s dangerous. Buses are frequent, packed, and extremely cheap, while taxis are everywhere and make some video-game-like moves. She won’t miss Environment Canada much at all, though I’m sure that before long she’ll be doing at least voluntary work in the environmental field here. (Our city is in CHINA. It’s incredible how many Chinese people there are here. Did I mention that we live in China?) 

In short – yeah, I know, too late -- we’ve been busy. We’ve been learning. We’ve been happy and happening. It’s Sunday night, September 13. (Back home, it’s Sunday morning; we’re exactly 12 hours ahead of EST.) Sam starts his third week of school, while I start my first classes tomorrow afternoon. Diana will have Chinese class, likely further perils in grocery shopping, and will refine a presentation on the environment that she’ll be doing for the English class of one of our new Baha’i friends here. And it’ll all seem more or less normal. (Except when it doesn’t.) We’re drawing on the strength of so many good friends, good wishes, and good families. And we sing, fairly constantly, together and in our minds, the tune we learned in Washington and practised in Macau, a setting of a passage from the Baha’i writings:

“Armed with the power of Thy Name, nothing can ever hurt me, and with Thy love in my heart, all the world’s afflictions can in no wise alarm me…”

A classic tension in life and fiction lies between the poles of unfettered individualism and the imperatives of the wider society. North America, and the United States in particular, became in the 20th century the home ground for an ethos that favoured individualism – especially the rugged, masculine kind – as the supreme value. Even religious inclinations were understood primarily in the context of personal benefit. The life, liberty and pursuit of happiness so central to the American project were interpreted increasingly as individual quests, rather than collective ones.

The ideal of the Self-Made Man, grown iconic in the stories of Horatio Alger and the reputedly solo exploits of Lindbergh, Elvis, even Einstein, becomes a problem in the relationship of a father and son. How can a man lift himself by his own bootstraps and still follow in his father’s footsteps? The failure, even the refusual, to recognize the debt owed to paternity is one of the less-known consequences of individualism, especially for males in American culture. The men’s movement that found its strongest – if occasionally cringe-making – expression in works like Bly’s Iron John is based upon one fundamental perception: that fatherly guidance is shockingly minimal in the experience of modern men, that for many there is a smoking hole where a father should be.

Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from the early 20th century flirt with this theme. The father figure is either remote, implied, someone to be respected in his absence by recalling his views about drinking or literature, or he is suddenly and overwhelmingly present, exposing Nick to struggle and death in a way for which he is utterly unprepared. In Kurt Vonnegut, we see a retrospective longing to understand his distant, disappointed Dad. (Accounting for Kurt the younger’s long retention of the “Junior” in his pen name.) Recently, the most remarkable feature of the apocalypse imagined by Cormac McCarthy in The Road is a fiercely protective and starkly intimate relationship between an anonymous father and his nameless son. We wonder if only such a world-devouring flame could make such interdependence and devotion possible.

***

 
Given this framework, consider George and Peter Caldwell, the father and son central to John Updike’s 1963 novel The Centaur. A compelling, often aggravating aspect of the novel is the tortured working-out of their relationship, one based on misunderstanding and mutual inadequacy. Neither knows much about the other, a familiar enough story, but the novel is also preoccupied with the failure that son is to father, and especially that George is to Peter. The ancient mythology behind these two mid-century American men adds depth to their portraits, and a puzzling twist. A long-suffering and rather neurotic teacher, Caldwell gains a burnish of nobility when Updike casts him as Chiron, the immortal centaur who tutors the young heroes and minor divinities of the glade. His son Peter is a clear Prometheus figure, enduring the afflictions not only of the intelligent, artistic soul chained to a small-town high school, but those stemming from “that ancient sin – the theft of fire”.¹ Oddly, though, Chiron refers to his only child as Ocyrhoe, a Naiad, a freshwater spirit endowed with prescience and femininity. It is one of several curiosities about Caldwell’s approach to parenting.

The first mild indictment of George Caldwell as a father appears early, courtesy of the novel’s first narrator, an omniscient one: “He worried about the kid when he had the time.” [page 12, emphasis added] Only later, though, such as when Caldwell leaves a telling, more-than-collegial conversation with Hester Appleton, do we get a clearer sense of his ambiguous connection with Peter. He “heads for the stairs groggy with woes” [196], chiefly Peter’s education and the lack of money for it, Peter’s skin, Peter’s health. He remembers how, in the fearful days of the Depression, Peter’s face looking back from his Kiddy Kar had reassured him of solidity, of his place in the world. However, “[n]ow his son’s face…gnaws at Caldwell’s heart like a piece of unfinished business.” [196]

Although he insists to Pop Kramer that “the kid’s like I am” [66], Caldwell doesn’t understand his son, and is often oblivious of Peter’s feelings and needs. His failure to wear the expensive gloves Peter has bought him is compounded by the hitch-hiker’s theft of them. Worse, for Peter, his father has no sense of how much his son enjoys driving with him, radio blasting, feeling “irresistible” together [78], in tune and in love with his future. Not only does George stop for the seedy hiker, he shatters Peter’s highway dream by flipping off the radio, fails to protect his son from their passenger’s leering and vulgarity, brings up Peter’s psoriasis (à propos of nothing in particular), and even suggests that this decrepit vagrant “'take him along!’” [89] to Florida. The loss of the gloves, after these samples of George’s obtuse and verbally incontinent interaction with Peter, might seem almost incidental. He rages at his father after the hitchhiker gracelessly leaves: “'Really, Daddy, what do you think about when you babble like that?’” [91] But for the boy, “the way he permitted my expensive and painstakingly deliberated gift to sift through him generated a clumsy weight” and somehow makes his father’s death seem “a grave and dreadful threat”. [92-3]

Caldwell’s weaknesses as a father, along with his personal and professional failings, are fed by the chronic and “infantile resentment…within his mature reconstruction” [23]. And as Peter notices in hindsight, “[b]reaking the barrier [of 50] had unbridled his tongue” [53]. Caldwell’s speech bears a startling resemblance to the ravings of another 20th-century American literary father, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. (Loman’s grown son Biff’s complaints about the “vomit he spews from his mind” might have been echoed by a more caustic Peter Caldwell.) Unlike Willy, though, George is inclined to self-deprecation. Peter is barraged by paternal self-criticism; he regularly hears, as when the Buick’s driveshaft breaks, comments like, “'You poor devil….You deserved a winner and you got a loser’” [150] or “'What does it feel like to win?...Jesus, I’ll never know’” [142] when speaking to Peter and Deifendorf after the swim meet. This is garrulousness gone mad.²

A particular verbal betrayal of his son stands out. Early in the novel, Peter is hurt when his father claims (to the hitchhiker) that “'misery and horror [were] my memories’” [87], and wonders where his birth fits into that narrow catalogue. George frequently expresses a constipated longing to be free of his family, as with his repeated wish that he’d put the dramatic Cassie on stage (though it is never clear that there had been any interest or opportunity to do that). At Minor Kretz’s diner, though, after Peter dresses him down for being “ridiculous” in his fears about Zimmerman and Mrs. Herzog, Caldwell makes it painfully plain that his regrets are not confined to being a husband: “'If I had your self-confidence I would’ve taken your mother onto the Burley-cue stage and you never would’ve been born….’ This is as close to a rebuke of his son as he ever came. The boy’s cheeks burn.” [209] Surely any number of direct, tangible chastisements of Peter would be preferable to this suggestion that George’s life is strained and impeded by his very existence. 

Peter “gnaws at Caldwell’s heart like a piece of unfinished business” because his father believes him to be basically unsound, wholly unready for adult life, at a time when George feels his own death to be imminent. His comments to numerous adults, and especially his tendency to speak for Peter and pre-empt his answers to their questions, point to his oppressive sense of his son’s inadequacy. “'That poor kid’s as confused as I am,’” George tells the hitchhiker. [89] He barely hears Hester, the woman he feels he should have married, when she argues that Peter is less fragile than Caldwell thinks; shortly afterward, her questions about Peter’s education prompt Caldwell to blurt that “'it scares the living daylights out of me. As far as I can tell, the kid knows even less than I did at his age what the score is…’” [193]. In conversations with both Phillips and Zimmerman, the suggestion of a sabbatical for George prompts apocalyptic uncertainty about Peter’s ability to survive: “'He needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue yet.’” [223]  

This profound dismay at his son’s inadequacy clarifies the puzzling early references to Chiron’s “daughter”, Ocyrhoe. Caldwell is haunted by Peter’s “face, dappled, feminine in the lips and eyelashes” [196] and his constant susceptibility to colds: “'Poor kid. I wish I could give him my mulish body.’” [290] He regards Peter’s interest in art with great suspicion, and links him with Cassie as a “real femme”. He feels that Peter wants “'the whole world in a candy box,’” [224] indicating that he regards Peter’s as an unrealistic and effeminate view of life. In his ennobled incarnation as Chiron, the wisest centaur, Caldwell is able to rejoice in his delicate and creative child, to fondly consider “how rich with life this girl was!...too intelligent to take her childhood easily; her tantrums had grieved [his] pride in her.” [96] Caldwell’s concerns for Peter are not openly expressed as sexual ones, but the Chiron sequences do suggest that he worries in part about his son because he is no mule, no broken-nosed football player, no Deifendorf (or even a Dedman).³ 

Such worries, only hinted at by his father, are clearly expressed by Peter. He wears shoes a size too small, wishing he had “a dancer’s quick and subtle hooves” and “grace notes like Fred Astaire” [57]; he finds the frank physicality of his one 4H meeting horrid; he paints and has a precocious admiration for Vermeer; he describes his psoriasis as “the coarsely mottled outer petals of a delicate, delicious, silvery vegetable-heart I was peeling toward” [165]; in his Alton hotel reverie, “[a] virginal sense of the forbidden welled over me like a wind and I discovered myself a unicorn…” [165]; on his Promethean rock of pain, he is visited by Deifendorf, who offers instructional tips on heterosexual love, which to Peter “'seems so brutal.’” [177] A series of encounters – one in childhood with a derelict whose words “score” him for life, one with the blackmailing Alton drunk who harasses Caldwell for being an abusive “'old nance…an old lech’” [157-8], and especially the episode with the slimy hitchhiker – bring Peter’s sexual uncertainty into harsh relief. “Something dainty [in the man they pick up in the car]…made me wonder if he were a fairy….I felt, as long as my love of girls remained unconsummated, open on that side – a three-walled room any burglar could enter.” [79-80]. Such vulnerability, of course, makes his later sexual progress with Penny cause for both exultation and relief.

Peter Caldwell, as concerned as he is about his sexuality, is more shaken by the “addled and vehement shipwreck of a man” [103] that is his father. He tells his side of the story from an adult remove, but we (unlike Caldwell) are able to see the intelligence and foresight of this 15-year-old, as well as his adolescent fear and fumbling. While his father “was often a joke” [63] between Peter and his artistic mother, the overheard conversation between George and Cassie on the first morning becomes a frightful burden for him. As Peter listens to the radio while George drives them to school, he sees his own creative future in a glorious America, but also a lyrical vision of what he might do for the troubled man beside him: “I carried my father in the tale of a comet through the expectant space of our singing nation.” [78] Peter is immediately thrust, though, back into the prosaic world as they pass the Seven-Mile Tavern, Potteiger’s Store, the Clover Leaf Dairy and finally an alarming man with an extended thumb. Still, he tries to sustain his ‘Daddy’, and shows himself to indeed be his father’s son; his “simple plan, which was to get him home” [143] is undertaken about as effectively and as systematically as George’s flailing attempts to do the same service for Peter.

Yet Peter dislikes comparisons with his father, generally siding with Cassie in a smirking, mother-son conspiracy. He is mildly chastened when his profuse explanations and apologies to Vera at their snow-bound breakfast result in her saying, “'Hush. You sound like your father’” [274]. The night before, Peter is seized by “absolute rage against this fool” [240], Zimmerman, in part because the principal has repeatedly bludgeoned him, in front of Penny, with the patronizing phrase “'like his father’”. Having continually faced the school’s senior ‘Titans’, “these tall criminals” [122] at Kretz’s diner, Peter cannot bear such a comparison from the man he sees as his father’s chief tormentor. He garners some enjoyable limelight in the senior students’ mockery of George, a delicious conspiracy fuelled by their “fermented guilt and fondness” [121] for the man, not to mention his own. And he is delighted by the final nod of approval: “'You got a great father there, Peter.’” [122]

What is more difficult for the junior Caldwell, though, is the paternal way that George has with Deifendorf: “He loved my father. It pains me to admit it, but there existed between this obscene animal and my father an actual affection….I resented how lavishly my father outpoured himself before the boy…” [102] Peter is resentful as he listens to his father’s blunt and funny counsel to Deifendorf after class, or sits in on Caldwell’s hapless attempts at impersonating a swim coach (and Deifendorf’s profanely disrespectful responses to them) after that evening’s meet. In part, Peter finds it contemptible that his father even tries to talk like a coach, but there is a stronger reason for his distaste with the relationship: “This was unfair; for wasn’t it after all what I wanted to hear from him – the confident, ordinary, world-supporting accents of other men?” [105, emphasis added] He arrives at the YMCA, and following a jealous attempt at mocking Deifendorf, Peter hears just such a longed-for accent, but it is not addressed to him. “'I’m proud of you, Deify.⁴ You kept your promise to the best of your ability. That makes you a man.’” [141] Later, even though his own son’s future is too terribly mysterious to contemplate, Caldwell manages to offer career advice even to the professional layabout, Johnny Dedman. Peter “is overswept…by a wave of distaste for all that mediocre, fruitless, cloying involvement” [206-7], in no small measure because there seems to be no room for involvement with him. Even in heavily ironic hindsight, it irks Peter that Deifendorf followed in his father’s footsteps, while “an authentic second-rate abstract expressionist living…with a Negro mistress, me” [103] had scorned to do so.

But for all his teenaged resistance, Peter is sufficiently self-aware to know that he actually is like his father, and not only in his height and big feet. Even at 15, he recognizes that “[m]y conscience and my father were rarely on opposite sides” [116]. He is smart and funny, and inclined to self-deprecation (“'Ha, I doubt if I’m much of a catch,’” he responds to Vera’s teasing about Penny [276]). He can be garrulous and argumentative, as he is in attacking Minor Kretz’s “black Republican stupidity…[which] embodies everything in the world which is killing Peter’s father…” [204] In his anxiety to have Penny know his dread epidermal secret, he shares with his father the deprived son’s need to have, as Cassie acidly remarks about George, “'some new way of getting sympathy.’” [289] Most tellingly, though, is a sudden realization fuelled by Peter’s frustration at George’s continued obsession with Zimmerman. As the oppressive and impassable snow falls, Peter rages about his father’s superstition and paranoia and implores him to relax. He kicks the dashboard and receives a submissive non-answer to his furious interrogation. “From the weariness of his voice, it seems his final effort of explanation. I’m killing my father, Peter thinks, amazed.” [258] We see why the prescience of the child is a “torment”.

Years later, looking back from his bohemian loft and his less-than-shining career, next to his Negro mistress, he knows that he is not as far from Olinger and Firetown as he imagined he would be. He misses the “sudden white laughter…[of] souls…trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter.” [269] He considers the passage from grandfather to grandson, and wryly notes, “Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.” [269] For all that Peter wishes he could give his woman everything, even “be a Negro for you”, he recognizes and accepts where he comes from, just as his father finally attains some degree of acceptance of his eventual death and even a little tentative joy at what he can still do for others. Once, Peter had felt ashamed, but strangely important, as senior Titans regaled the diner with Caldwell tales and made him feel like “the petty receptacle of a myth” [121]. But from his adult perch, even as he rambles on with storied memories that have long put his lady to sleep, Peter is able to graciously admit, “I am my father’s son.” [269]

***

In The Centaur, Updike unsparingly reveals the gulf of mutual incomprehension, and the sneering or oblivious words, that divide father from son. Perhaps because of the early death of his own father, Caldwell “had never rid himself of the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated [his] home.” [273] A pathetic line from Death of a Salesman – Willy’s admission to his neighbour that “I never had a chance to talk to [my father], and I still feel - kind of temporary about myself” – could easily have been spoken by a less frenzied and more introspective George. Because for all Caldwell’s constant blather, and Peter’s exasperation with it – “'Stop telling me …things all the time. Let’s stop talking’” [264] – their relationship is most compromised, as with so many sons and fathers literary and real, by what they are chronically unable to say to each other. In the hotel, after the car has died, Peter’s father “looked at me, and seemed on the verge of an apology, confession, or a definite offer. There was a word – I did not know it but believed he did – that waited between us to be pronounced.” [164, emphasis added] It is never said. When the car fails to make Coughdrop Hill in the snow for the second time, Caldwell slumps at the wheel in defeat and Peter is frightened to see “his father’s silhouette go out of shape this way. He wishes to call him to himself but the syllable sticks in his throat, unknown.” We wonder about the syllable he seeks – live? love? rise? go? Dad?— but Peter instead asks about tire chains.

In McCarthy’s The Road, the magic incantation by which father and son repeatedly consult and console and reassure each other, in the midst of their hellish migration, has two syllables. Okay? Okay. Such a simple verbal trick is lacking for George and Peter Caldwell, these brainy and verbal men. In the persona of Chiron, the teacher and father laments his inability to relieve the gentle Ocyrhoe of her prescience, and by his submission hopes “to earn her forgiveness for his inability to work her cure.” [96] A frustrated Peter does ask for forgiveness, this essential thing; he appears to ask for absolution for having been born. Sadly, this important request only occurs during his flight of Promethean fantasy: “Daddy, don’t rest! What would you do? Can’t you forgive us and keep going?” [189] Forgiveness is the consolation that each desires but cannot ask for.

The indeterminate death of Caldwell in The Centaur, however, is not the grim death of a Loman. Updike permits grace notes in the final pages of this three-day odyssey of a father and son. As they finally approach home, a fevered Peter has been annoyed by his father’s humiliating announcement at Potteiger’s store – “'he wants to see his mamma’” [283] – and his anxious statements of the blatantly obvious. Through this chronic alienation, he still sees in his father, as he tries to walk in his snowy footsteps, “the shape of the neck and head of a horse I was riding.” [285] There is no artificially sweetened ending, no joyful final reconciliation, no opening of mutual understanding and delight. But there is a stubborn acknowledgement that the individual is not all. We see the small but significant joy of a self-sacrificing father, and the gratitude of a bemused but still loving son, even if, in an individualistic culture, “few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.” [299]                 
 

Notes

[This should've been up a month ago. Getting caught up. Sorry for the delay.]

Week 22 of Guitar for Dummy started off sweetly. Once upon a mall wander, when I should have been doing my consumptive business and getting the hell home, I hit the pseudo-intellectual indulgences store, where they sell cigarettes, chocolate bars, and more mags about more things than I could imagine.

Stores like this -- does anyone call them “smoke shops” anymore? -- with their racks upon racks of magazines always hypnotize me if I allow myself to walk in. Mercifully, I can usually pass by the sections for women, knitters, video game junkies and home repairmen. Normally, the music section is also beyond me, unless the cover features an artist I know. I’ve always loved music, but I felt outside it. Now, however, that I was a Certified Guitar Butcher, it seemed unjust that I had never bought a music mag, so it was a breakout day: would it be Guitar? Guitar One?Acoustic Guitar?Fingerstyle Guitar? Vintage Guitar? Guitar World? Old Fart Guitar Diletantte Galaxy? (I made the last one up.) I settled, for a reason I can’t remember, on Guitar Player magazine. 

It was a bit of a Looking Glass experience. It had English text, photos of (mainly) familiar things – faces, guitars, curvy women reminding me that I was an ol’ babe in BoyLand – and ubiquitous advertising, but it was a strange land where I could see and read and still not find much sense. (John Mayer (?) plays Regular Slinky and Power Slinky…okay, sure…Fasel infused classic wah cutting high gain distortion searing double-edge tone…I think that was a good thing, but it took me awhile to figure out where the verbs were…) It went on. I noticed spank-guitar shred lessons and alnico classica humbuckers. I certainly didn’t understand the local customs or dialect in this new world. (Toto, I don't think we're in Sports Illustrated anymore...)

I thought Guitar Player might teach me something, and that it might be good airport reading, because we were off on a family trip. We’d decided on Guadeloupe: it would be an immersion in French, and we knew two couples who had lived and worked there. Okay, and palm trees and sun. Just days ahead of our flight, I’d found that friends of these friends could lend me a guitar for the two weeks we’d be there. I stopped hunting for a titanium guitar case for baggage handlers to play catch with. Gordie would stay home and safe. 

4:30 am taxi, 6 am hop from Ottawa to Montreal, 9:30 Air Canada flight to Point à Pitre, during which we removed the many layers of clothing we’d needed for -25 degrees C. and got ready for the tropics. We arrived, met by other new friends. (So good to belong to the Bahá’í community, with friends and fellows everywhere we go.) Got settled in our gite, joined our new friends for an evening, returned weary and grateful for a clean bed at about 11 pm, and only then realized, with a foggy head but emotional air raid sirens, that my guitar connection hadn’t been at the meeting. ARGH!

I was up against it: The Streak was in jeopardy. The goal I’d set for myself had been 365 straight days at the altar of the guitar muse. The day before we left, I had played for the one hundred and fiftieth consecutive day, and looked forward to playing in the warmth of a Caribbean evening. But now it was late, in a guest house in rural Guadeloupe. (The nearest neighbours were cows and roosters.) I made a desperate stab-in-the-dark request. Good news: Yes, the proprietor said, my grandson has a guitar you could borrow! Profoundly helpless and regretful news: But he doesn’t live here. Maybe you could have it by tomorrow.

I was buried by it: The Streak was over! Hard to take, but there was no way around it. I had made a promise that in the end – well, in the middle, actually – I couldn’t keep. Shoulda brought my own guitar. Damn! Did we go to the wrong meeting, maybe? Where was Christine?... But there you go, and there I went. It was a lovely night for sleeping, and I was crispy with fatigue et un peu de chagrin. But it wasn’t the disappointment that kept waking me up – it was the damned roosters. 

Rose-Hélène was true to her world, and the grandson’s small guitar was in my hands for our first full day on the island. It took a long while to tune – at least I’d had the foresight to bring my electronic tuner, or I’d have been cooked trying to coax music out of that thing. After about six or seven minutes, it made some recognizable noises, though it had ridiculously high action, rather like the ol’ broken-necked Degas that I started with. It was a comfort to be back on the musical trail. I didn’t even try to go all heroic and somehow redeem the sins of the previous day. Jes’ played, and it felt good to not be too desperate or anal about the whole thing. Life goes on. The Streak was at One.

After two days with the baby guitar, I was back to full-size after finally meeting my connection. (Some people go to the Caribbean in search of illicit chemicals. Heck, I scored six strings.) It was a full-sized classical acoustic, dusty and out of tune but a good machine. There were little coloured circles all over the fretboard, but I didn’t really try to figure out the chord calculus. I just did my dusty old things in a bright new place: the windows of our gite were always open, so I tried to do my late-night strumming softly, thumbly. (I ended up not using a pick the whole time there.) After all, the other guests were, well, heck, some of ‘em were considerably older than ME, and dawn comes early in Gwada. (And according to several neurotic cocks, it comes over and over again, the all-night rooster version of the movie Groundhog Day…). So no psycho percussion, no windmills, no blues hollers or howls of frustration.

All was well, and then a few days later, it happened again! ANOTHER MISSED DAY. Was it the water? (Or the lack of it?) Was it bad sleeps, or hot days after Canadian ones? I’m not sure, but after a day as the loyal chauffeur and pack mule for the princess, and then some beach time and too much sun and a miserable drive home, I couldn’t friggin’ get around to the guitar because I had my head in a toilet for much of the evening. I finally was able to tumble into an exhausted sleep, and I didn’t even consider playing. Sigh. And so a new challenge came: would I still get that daily practice in without the absurd but effective spur of a long run of commitment?

My favourite practice of the trip happened a couple of days later. I sat on a rock, down near Atlantic’s edge in a town called Le Moule. For an inland lad like me, the swell and the roar of the waves is intoxicating, and I liked it well. The surf pounded relentlessly, and I sweated profusely. I turned my ballcap backwards to keep my neck from reddening and, but of course, to present the image of an arty young vagabond, sitting on a rock, discovering himself and chronicling his generation in song by the sea. (Too bad there were no other rampant sentimentalists there. If a narcissist plays by the ocean / Does anybody see?) So, yes, I was a bit self-conscious – still! – about playing "in public", even though there was almost nobody around. Still, I had a blast: beautiful scene, beautiful sun, one idea in mind and time on my hands. It felt like a vacation. Sweet!

Our first week in Guadeloupe was a delight. (Except for that toilet episode.) I was quite proud of myself that the end of The Streak didn’t sabotage my commitment, or hasn’t seemed to. It was the only bit of dark cloud we had. So now the count stands, for those of you scoring at home, at 159 out of 161 days – not what I’d been planning, but a fair percentage. The Streak is now at 5. Whoop-de-do...

[Late posting. Apologies to all who noticed.]

There was a part of me that hoped that by this time, nearly 150 days into this crusade, I would be obsessed. By and large, my habits are pretty well established when I’m at home, and it’s no great inconvenience for me to get my work done. But knowing how I can get utterly locked in to patterns of thinking and concentrated (if brainless) activity, I had thought vaguely about how to manage a raging addiction to guitar playing. How will I handle it when I stop coming to meals? What’ll I do when my writing day begins to suffer because the boy just wants to play?

Well, home safe, I guess. No worries about dependency yet. I recently read a piece on Tom Morello, the rocker with a brain (and a social conscience, and a lifelong love for the Cubs, I believe) from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. He started on the guitar relatively late, as a Harvard freshman, but made his own fervent pact to play each day, no matter how many essays were due. Legend has it that those playing sessions could last as long as eight hours. (Show-off! Creep!) Mine have approached ONE hour, oh, maybe twice.

And unless I start heeding advice from the Sonshine Boys – Dad, you gotta play more SONGS! Find stuff you like on-line, or write your own! They can be as dumb as rocks, but they’ll get you pumped -- that kind of momentum will never be able to sweep me along. DAMN, but I’m a slow learner! 

Songs, songs, songs. So what are the great songs I’ve loved, the singable songs for the very middle-aged? Time for a list, in no particular order, and then I’ll see which ones are actually Playable By A Guy Like Me:

Lorelei (The Pogues): might be simple enough, and so much feeling.

Jungleland (Bruce Springsteen): wow, but maybe too complex? One of the greatest songwriterly things ever. And Blood on Blood, or almost anything from Nebraska.

Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles): is a cello required?

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Jimmy LaFave): I love the LaFave version of this old Jimmy Webb song. On a Bus to St. Cloud is another melancholy, lovelorn ballad that Lafave delivers well, a song by Gretchen Peters.

So many from Bruce Cockburn, but let’s say "Tie Me at the Crossroads" and "Great Big Love". Maybe I should learn one of his sensual ones, though; odd that this introverted, rather intellectual master guitarist has written some of the sexiest stuff ever. "Sahara Gold", par exemple.

Boots or Hearts (The Tragically Hip): some alt-country type should record this, I’ve always thought. Locked in the Trunk of a Car knocks me sideways, but I don’t know how campfire friendly it is. Son One wants me to learn Wheat Kings, but it doesn’t get me. Not yet, anyway, but it is a three-chorder.

Naïve Melody (Talking Heads): I wonder if these are too funky for simple guitar playing. Byrne does a guitar-only rendition of Psycho Killer on Stop Making Sense, which may be manageable.

Road Trippin' (RHCP): I don't like earlier stuff much, but Californication is a terrific album. Real melodies and harmonies.

And this is so much fun, I could go on and on and never actually learn any of ‘em!! Ah, resistance. I’ve been reading a lot about you in The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and here you are, Resistance, you old seducer. There is one song that I’ve been working on, though, and the satisfactions are strong. It’s a chord progression to play behind a prayer I’ve learned to sing: Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain…where mention of God hath been made and His praise glorified… It’s a sweet and lovely invocation of the holiness of all places, when the spirit is given its due. And blessed is the spot where music is made, too, whether couch or bedside, but the chords are a bit tough for me: A, A7, E, E7, and D are more than manageable, but I still stumble over three bar chords. There's a B minor, and A#7, and an F# minor.

But The Spot has begun to prove to me the wisdom of my young teachers. It’s nice to play something that sounds like a song. Keep at it, ol’ fella. 147 days down, and better days to come. Maybe even a little compulsion, for a change.

Well, I just keep hacking away. It’s all about hideously retro concepts like faith and, ugh, duty. I can do dutiful, but it wouldn't hurt to have some beautiful. I could sure use some inspiration. Just after the funeral dirge that was the last progress (?) report, I actually put together two really fine days of practice in a row. Whining is virtue! Venting can be fun and productive. Catharsis lives!

There was no aha, no shining moment of clarity. But as has happened before, coming back to work on smooth and semi-automatic chord changes did the trick, for a couple of days anyway. The Big Picture was awfully cloudy, but the microscopic viewpoint helped me see some new things. I realized that my index finger is always en retard when I’m shaping a D chord, so I’ve been focussing on getting that reluctant follower to lead for a change. He’s still not trustworthy, but Finger One can surprise me by doing what he ought to without me having to remind him every time.

Because we were either on the road or doing home improvements for much of the last two weeks, it was as if my 100-Day guitar habit had never been. More than once, I staggered gratefully to bed after a too-long day, pooped and dim-witted, only to realize that I hadn’t visited the Six String Chapel that day. Argh! Much groaning and rationalization ensued. Don’t be so anal. It’s after midnight anyway, so what does it matter? Besides, maybe One Missed Day – oh, the horror! the horror! -- will give you something more interesting to write about, you know, the tragic death of a perfect attendance record (what is this, Sunday school?), and the inspirational story of overcoming that awful setback and building anew. No? Well, how ‘bout this? Just between you and me and the dishes in the sink, nobody cares whether you miss a friggin’ day! You’re not that important! This is about as meaningful as a dog taking a dump in the woods. Rover has a consecutive days streak going, too.

One of those days was the Princess’s birthday, so to that snarling voice was added her sweet one. It had been a quiet and lovely evening, and sleep was calling when the realization hit. “Oh, stay with me, it’s so warm. And it’s my birthday…” Now that was pretty convincing. I came close to falling from musical/dutiful grace, such as it is, so I had to summon my best argument. (Not so much to convince her, but myself. And it worked. It might even be true.) “If I miss one day, a second one won’t matter. Next thing you know, a week’ll go by and I won’t mind much. I'm not in lessons, so who's gonna notice? The thing is, I feel like I could mail the whole thing in. It's bloody fragile.” Okay, so maybe I’m a drama prince. (We all gotta get some drama somewhere.) But this Guitar Player persona IS fragile, and I could lose my tenuous toe-hold on the sheer face of music very easily. So I stumbled down to my mom-in-law’s laundry room, leaned against the washer and played some cement-floor blues. It actually felt good, like a small sacrifice that might someday have value. And the Princess was sleeping, and the bed was just as warm, when I gratefully crawled into it half an hour later.

A few days after that tiny crisis, I had a more comfortable perch in my big sister’s living room, and somebody to play with. It was the Return of the Itinerant Artist, into my personal space at least. While I didn’t get as much time as I’d hoped for guitar renewal with my music guru and son the IA, it was marvy good. He answered some questions, and made helpful observations on my technique and on my earnestly clumsy approach to this whole business. He showed me how to play the acoustic guitar line to “Wheat Kings” by The Tragically Hip. (It’s just G to C and back, with a D thrown into the chorus. Pretty much the same ingredients as CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain”, but an entirely different rhythm. I’m going to have to hear it some more, because I’ve lost the feel of it.) We looked at my attempts at playing the Twelve-Bar Blues sequence – still having some trouble getting smoothly into the B7 chord, but I know da blues – and then the IA gave me a great and much-needed experience. “Okay, Dad, you play that line, over and over, don’t stop, and I’ll solo over the top of it.”

And away we went, two acoustic guitars in a quiet small-town living room, and I was playing MUSIC! I need to find way more of that. Holy Fun! ‘Course, when ever now and again I tried to get a little creative with my strumming rhythm, I instantly lost track of the chord changes. And it didn’t matter. The IA would just nod, smile and keep picking, and I’d gradually find my way back into the groove. Sweetness!

And on another road trip night, in another living room, brother-in-law Silent Paul and I followed our epic country walk with some guitar sharing. (He's not so silent when it's just two guys and some ideas that he cares about.) Actually, most of the sharing was his, as he’s a lot farther down this road than I am and actually performs in his church sometimes. He showed me a fine little sequence that starts with a different fingering of the basic E chord, leaving the first finger free. Sliding that same shape up the fretboard, and barring the 5th, 7th and 9th frets behind it with the free index finger, produces respectively a higher A, a B and (dropping finger three) a C minor chord. Nifty. SP got excited about showing me this guitar lick, and worked hard to figure out how to write the sequence of chords for me, since he plays it beautifully and brainlessly. I’ll need at least one more visit down home before I grasp this sequence – Paul gives me way too much credit – but it’ll be, at least, a fresh reason and a new way to work on bar chords.

Even better, it was a chance to share this way-too-solitary cruise with others. For those two nights, playing guitar was less lonely and more interesting. (This playing alone in my cave is what the IA mainly means when he shakes his head at my weird way of learning guitar.) I still don’t play well with others, or very much, anyway, but there’s hope. Two living rooms' worth.